DAILY INTELLIGENCE BRIEF

The Vault — AI Edition

Saturday, July 25, 2026
15 stories
13,620 words
65 min read

Business

5
01

Etched Closes $300 Million Series C at $10.3 Billion to Challenge Nvidia on Inference

Four years ago, three Harvard undergraduates dropped out of school on a wager most of Silicon Valley thought was reckless.

4 minRead →
02

AegisAI Raises $36 Million to Fight AI-Generated Phishing at the Inbox

The same generative AI that lets a marketer draft a flawless cold email now lets a criminal write a flawless con.

4 minRead →
03

Paper Raises $34 Million to Become the Design Layer for AI-Built Software

When software gets written by machines, who draws the picture first? A startup called Paper is betting on the answer.

4 minRead →
04

Ropedia Raises $30 Million to Build the Data Layer for Physical AI

Singapore-based Ropedia has raised $30 million to scale a bet on what the next great leap in robotics really needs.

4 minRead →
05

Elio Raises $21 Million to Build Sensors Made for Machines, Not Human Eyes

For a century, the camera has been designed around a single customer: the human eye. Elio wants to change that.

4 minRead →

Llms Genai

4
06

Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 Folds Image, Video, Audio and Robot Control Into One Model

The German lab that taught the internet to generate photorealistic images now wants to teach machines to move.

4 minRead →
07

Genspark's 'AI Workspace 6.0' Adds a Perpetual Memory and Its First Hardware

For two years, the pitch behind the AI agent boom has run into the same wall: the agent forgets what you told it.

5 minRead →
08

OpenAI's Codex Doubles to 10 Million Users and Learns to Take Voice Commands

OpenAI's coding agent is no longer a niche tool for early adopters tinkering at a keyboard.

4 minRead →
09

Jensen Huang Makes His X Debut With a Manifesto for Open AI Models

Jensen Huang has run Nvidia for more than three decades. This week he finally started posting on X.

4 minRead →

Research

3
10

A New Open-Source Framework Lets AI Move Between Robot Bodies

Getting a new robot to do anything at all can eat a semester before a student tests a single idea.

5 minRead →
11

COMPASS Tackles the Long-Horizon Problem That Trips Up AI Agents

Ask a model to answer a question and it does fine. Ask it to run a 40-step research task and it drifts.

5 minRead →
12

Teaching AI Agents to Plan Before They Act, Efficiently

The reigning recipe for smarter AI agents in 2026 has been blunt: let them think longer. This paper pushes back.

5 minRead →

Policy

3
13

Publishers and Authors Sue Google, Alleging Gemini Was Trained on Stripped-Down Books

Three of the world's largest publishers and a best-known novelist accuse Google of building Gemini on stolen books.

4 minRead →
14

Researchers Say a Booby-Trapped Repo Can Make Claude Code Leak Files Silently

A security firm says an ordinary-looking repository can be rigged to make Claude Code read and leak a secret file.

5 minRead →
15

FTC Weighs a Policy Targeting AI Systems That Suppress Accuracy

The FTC has put AI companies on notice that quietly tuning a chatbot's outputs could be an unfair or deceptive practice.

4 minRead →